This page in a nutshell: The general rule is one editor, one account. Do not use multiple accounts to mislead, deceive, vandalize or disrupt; to create the illusion of greater support for a position; to stir up controversy; or to circumvent a block, ban, or sanction. Do not ask your friends to create accounts to support you. Do not revive old unused accounts and use them as different users, or use another person's account. Do not log out just to vandalize as an IP address editor.

To maintain accountability and increase community trust, editors are generally expected to use only one account. While there are some valid reasons for maintaining multiple accounts, it is improper to use multiple accounts (called sock puppetry, or socking) to deceive or mislead other editors, disrupt discussions, distort consensus, avoid sanctions, evade blocks, or otherwise violate community standards and policies.

a ban of the user (the sockmaster or sockpuppeteer) behind the accounts (each of which is a sockpuppet or sock)

on-project exposure of all accounts and IP addresses used across Wikipedia and its sister projects

the (potential) public exposure of any "real-world" activities or personal information deemed relevant to preventing future sock puppetry or certain other abuses.[1]

An editor using multiple accounts for valid reasons should, on each account's user page, list all the other accounts with an explanation of their purpose (see below). Optionally, the user and user talk pages of some of the accounts can be redirected to those of another. Editors who use unlinked alternative accounts, or who edit as an IP address editor separate from their account, should carefully avoid any crossover on articles or topics because even innocuous activities such as copy editing, wikifying, or linking might be considered sock puppetry in some cases and innocuous intentions will not usually serve as an excuse.

Inappropriate uses of alternative accounts

Editors must not use alternative accounts to mislead, deceive, disrupt, or undermine consensus. This includes, but is not limited to:

Creating an illusion of support: Alternative accounts must not be used to give the impression of more support for a position than actually exists.

Editing project space: Undisclosed alternative accounts are not to be used in discussions internal to the project.[2]

Circumventing policies: Policies apply per person, not per account. Policies such as the three-revert rule are for each person's edits. Using a second account to violate policy will cause any penalties to be applied to your main account.

Contributing to the same page or discussion with multiple accounts: Editors may not use more than one account to contribute to the same page or discussion in a way that suggests they are multiple people. Contributing to the same page with clearly linked, legitimate, alternative accounts (e.g. editing the same page with your main and public computer account or editing a page using your main account that your bot account edited) is not forbidden.

Avoiding scrutiny: Using alternative accounts that are not fully and openly disclosed to split your editing history means that other editors may not be able to detect patterns in your contributions. While this is permitted in certain circumstances (see legitimate uses), it is a violation of this policy to create alternative accounts to confuse or deceive editors who may have a legitimate interest in reviewing your contributions.

Editing while logged out in order to mislead: Editing under multiple IP addresses may be treated as the same level of disruption as editing under multiple accounts when it is done deceptively or otherwise violates the principles of this policy. When editors log out by mistake, they may wish to contact an editor with oversight access to ensure there is no misunderstanding.

Misusing a clean start by switching accounts or concealing a clean start in a way that avoids scrutiny is considered a breach of this policy; see Wikipedia:Clean start.

Role accounts: Because an account represents your edits as an individual, "role accounts", or accounts shared by multiple people, are as a rule forbidden and blocked. Many first time editors may sign up an account with a username that implies it is a role account or is being shared. Such accounts are permitted only if the account information is forever limited to one individual; however, policy recommends that usernames avoid being misleading or disruptive. As such, if you edit for an organization, please refer to Wikipedia's username policy for guidance on choosing a name or a replacement name that can avoid these problems. Role account exceptions can be made for non-editing accounts approved to provide email access, accounts approved by the Wikimedia Foundation (list below), and approved bots with multiple managers. See Username policy – Sharing accounts.

Deceptively seeking positions of community trust. You may not run for positions of trust without disclosing that you have previously edited under another account. Adminship reflects the community's trust in an individual, not an account, so when applying for adminship, it is expected that you will disclose past accounts openly, or email the arbitration committee if the accounts must be kept private. Administrators who fail to disclose past accounts risk being desysopped, particularly if knowledge of them would have influenced the outcome of the RfA.

Using more than one administrator account: Editors may not have more than one account with administrator user rights, except for bots with administrator privileges. However, Foundation staff may operate more than one admin account, though they must make known who they are. If an administrator leaves the project, returns under a new username, and is nominated for adminship, he or she must resign or give up the administrator access of their old account.

Posing as a neutral or uninvolved commentator: Using an alternative account to participate in a discussion about another account operated by the same person.

Legitimate uses

Alternative accounts have legitimate uses. For example, editors who contribute using their real name may wish to use a pseudonym for contributions with which they do not want their real name to be associated, or long-term users might create a new account to better understand the editing experience from a new user's perspective. These accounts are not considered sockpuppets. If you use a legitimate alternative account, it is your responsibility to ensure that you do not use it in an illegitimate manner according to this policy.

Valid reasons for an alternative account include:

Security: You may register an alternative account for use when accessing Wikipedia through a public computer, connecting to an unsecured network, or other scenarios when there's a risk of your account being compromised. Such accounts should be publicly connected to the main account or use an easily identified name. For example, User:Mickey might use User:Mickey (alt) or User:Mouse, and redirect that account's user and talk pages to their main account.

Privacy: A person editing an article that is highly controversial within their family, social or professional circle, and whose Wikipedia identity is known within that circle, or traceable to their real-world identity, may wish to use an alternative account to avoid real-world consequences from their editing or other Wikipedia actions in that area. Although a privacy-based alternative account is not publicly connected to your main account, it should not be used in ways outlined in the inappropriate uses section of this page, and if it is, the account may be publicly linked to your main account for sanctions. If you are considering using an alternative account under this provision, please read the notification section below.

Doppelgänger accounts: A doppelgänger account is an account created with a username similar to your main account to prevent impersonation. Such accounts should not be used for editing. Doppelgänger accounts may be marked with the {{doppelganger}} or {{doppelganger-other}} tag, or can simply redirect to the main account's userpage.

Clean start under a new name: A clean start is when a user stops using an old account in order to start afresh with a new account, usually due to past mistakes or to avoid harassment. A clean start is permitted only if there are no active bans, blocks, or sanctions in place against the old account. Do not use your new account to return to topic areas, disputes, editing patterns, or behaviors previously identified as problematic, and you should be careful not to do anything that looks like an attempt to evade scrutiny. A clean start requires that you no longer use your old account(s), which should note on their user pages that they are inactive—for example, with the {{retired}} tag—to prevent the switch being seen as an attempt to sock puppet.

Username violations: If you are blocked for having an inappropriate username, and that is the sole reason for the block, you are permitted to create a new account with an appropriate username.

Compromised accounts: If you are unable to access your account because you have lost the password or because someone has obtained or guessed your password, you may create a new account with a clean password. In such a case, you should post a note on the user page of each account indicating that they are alternative accounts for the same person. If necessary, you should also ask for an admin to block the compromised account. You may want to consider using a committed identity in advance to help deal with this rare situation should it arise later.

Maintenance: An editor might use an alternative account to carry out maintenance tasks, or to segregate functions so as to maintain a user talk page dedicated to the purpose. The second account should be clearly linked to the main account.

Bots: Bots are programs that edit automatically or semi-automatically. Editors who use bots are encouraged to create separate accounts, and ask that they be marked as bot accounts via Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval, so that the automated edits can be filtered out of recent changes. Bots should be clearly linked to their owner's account. See Wikipedia:Bot policy.

Testing and training: Users who use a lot of scripts and other tools may wish to keep a second, "vanilla" account, for testing how things appear to others; or for demonstrating Wikipedia's default appearance when training new users. The second account should be clearly linked to the main account, except where doing so would interfere with testing or training, e.g. creating an account named "user:example" to serve as an example account analogous to the website example.com.

Designated roles: Editors with specific roles, such as Wikipedian in residence or Wikimedia Foundation employees, may have specific accounts for those roles. Note the account still belongs to an individual, not the role itself, and should be named as such. For example, User:ExampleName (WIR for Foo Museum) is an acceptable alternative account, but User:Wikipedian-in-residence for Foo Museum is not, because it is named after the role. It is not required that the names match, e.g. the main account User:JohnDoe could have the role account User:ExampleName (WIR for Foo Museum), but the accounts should be clearly connected. If the editor leaves the role, their role account must no longer be used. If a new editor assumes the role, they must create a new account.

Teaching: Teachers who incorporate Wikipedia into their classes may create an account for the purpose of supervising students. Use of the account should be limited to articles and other pages directly related to students and classwork.

Editing while logged out

There is no policy against editing the encyclopedia while logged out, per se. This happens for many reasons, including not noticing that the login session had expired, changing computers, going to a Wikipedia page directly from a link, and forgetting passwords. Editors who are not logged in must not actively try to deceive other editors, such as by directly saying that they do not have an account or by using the session for the inappropriate uses of alternate accounts listed earlier in this policy. To protect their privacy, editors who have edited while logged out are never required to connect their usernames to their IP addresses on-wiki.

If you have concerns that an IP editor is actually a user with an account who is editing while logged out in a way that is inappropriate, you can give the IP editor notice of this policy ({{uw-login}} is available for this purpose), and if the behavior continues, you should contact a CheckUser privately and present the evidence to them.

Alternative account notification

Except when doing so would defeat the purpose of having a legitimate alternative account, editors using alternative accounts should provide links between the accounts. Links should ideally take the form of all three of the following:

Links in the alternative account signature: if not linking to both the alternative and main account, link to the alternative account, and if necessary provide a note there requesting contact be made via the main account, or simply redirect the user talk page.

Meatpuppetry

This section in a nutshell: Do not recruit your friends, family members, or communities of people who agree with you for the purpose of coming to Wikipedia and supporting your side of a debate. If you feel that a debate is ignoring your voice, remain civil, and seek comments from other Wikipedians or pursue dispute resolution. These are well-tested processes, designed to avoid the problem of exchanging bias in one direction for bias in another.

High-profile disputes on Wikipedia often bring new editors to the site. Some individuals may promote their causes by bringing like-minded editors into the dispute. These editors are sometimes referred to as meatpuppets, following a common Internet usage. While Wikipedia assumes good faith, especially for new users, recruiting new editors to influence decisions on Wikipedia is prohibited. A new user who engages in the same behavior as another user in the same context, and who appears to be editing Wikipedia solely for that purpose, may be subject to the remedies applied to the user whose behavior they are joining. Sanctions have been applied to editors of longer standing who have not, in the opinion of Wikipedia's administrative bodies, consistently exercised independent judgment.

Wikipedia has processes in place to mitigate the disruption caused by an influx of single-purpose editors:

Consensus in many debates and discussions should ideally not be based upon number of votes, but upon policy-related points made by editors.

In votes or vote-like discussions, new users may be disregarded or given significantly less weight, especially if there are many of them expressing the same opinion. Their comments may be tagged with a note pointing out that they have made few or no other edits outside of the discussion.

A 2005 Arbitration Committee decision established: "For the purpose of dispute resolution when there is uncertainty whether a party is one user with sockpuppets or several users with similar editing habits they may be treated as one user with sockpuppets."[4]

The term meatpuppet may be seen by some as derogatory and should be used with care, in keeping with Wikipedia's civility policy. Because of the processes above, it may be counterproductive to directly accuse someone of being a "meatpuppet", and doing so will often only inflame the dispute.

If two or more registered editors use the same computer or network connection, their accounts may be linked by a CheckUser. Editors in this position are advised to declare such connections on their user pages to avoid accusations of sockpuppetry. There are userboxes available for this; see {{User shared IP address}}.

Closely connected users may be considered a single user for Wikipedia's purposes if they edit with the same objectives. When editing the same articles, participating in the same community discussion, or supporting each other in any sort of dispute, closely related accounts should disclose the connection and observe relevant policies such as edit warring as if they were a single account. If they do not wish to disclose the connection, they should avoid editing in the same areas, particularly on controversial topics.

CheckUser

Editors with access to the CheckUser tool may consult the server log to see which IP addresses are linked to which accounts. CheckUser cannot confirm with certainty that two accounts are not connected; it can only show whether there is a technical link at the time of the check. In accordance with the Wikimedia Foundation's Privacy and Checkuser policies, checks are only conducted with good cause, and (subject to the exceptions in those policies) results are reported in such a way as to avoid or minimize disclosure of personal identifying information. Particularly, "fishing"—the use of CheckUser without good cause specific to a given user account—is prohibited.

Blocking

If a person is found to be using a sock puppet, the sock puppet account(s) should be blocked indefinitely. The main account may be blocked at the discretion of any uninvolved administrator. IP addresses used for sock puppetry may be blocked, but are subject to certain restrictions for indefinite blocks.

Proving you are not a sock

One possibility to prove that your account is not a sock puppet is the Personal acquaintances WikiProject. This project was started in 2008 in the German language Wikipedia and uses a WMF labs tool where users can confirm that they have met a real person operating one specific Wikipedia or Wikimedia account at a meetup in real life. The project and its tool meanwhile have been translated to several other languages and can be accessed with any account using the global single user login. Once you have registered as a participant of Personal acquaintances, you need to be confirmed by three other participants in good standing before you can start confirming other real life persons yourself. For further information go to the project page linked above. You can show other Wikipedians that you are a real person by displaying the userbox {{Template:User Personal acquaintances}} on your userpage or the link to your list of confirmations via the url "https://tools.wmflabs.org/pb/beta/user/name/your username/".

List of role accounts

Non-editing accounts that provide an easy way to contact internal email lists:

References

"We hope that this never comes up, but we may disclose your personal information if we believe that it's reasonably necessary […] to protect our organization, employees, contractors, users, or the public. We may also disclose your personal information if we reasonably believe it necessary to detect, prevent, or otherwise assess and address potential spam, malware, fraud, abuse, unlawful activity, and security or technical concerns."

Information under this policy is not gratuitously released, but may be made public at times in the context of detecting, confirming, preventing, and resolving issues related to actual or possible abuse.